EMC World has closed its doors, but during the four-day event the storage powerhouse did its best to convince the more than 10,000 attendees that it is the best answer when it comes to the convergence of the cloud and big data. The annual conference featured more than 500 sessions, 100 labs and 100 exhibitors, and, if EMC made big announcements with its hardware refresh in January with 41 new products, there were more than enough announcements made this week.
With the focus on big data and the cloud, one of the first products announced was a data co-processing Hadoop appliance. The Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance marries Hadoop with the EMC Greenplum Database, allowing the co-processing of both structured and unstructured data. EMC also announced the Greenplum HD Community and Enterprise Editions, enabling organizations to take advantage of big data analytics without the overhead and complexity that comes with the cumbersome tools and solutions currently available. All three products are scheduled for release in the third quarter.
The Atmos cloud storage platform update, 2.0, is five times faster for object ingestion, while the Atmos GeoParity software is as much as 65 percent more efficient in protecting big data in cloud storage environments, according to EMC. VPLEX, which federates data located on multiple EMC and non-EMC storage systems, also got an update. VPLEX Geo is an industry first that enables active/active data over distance, allowing applications and data at two locations to be accessed, shared and dynamically moved thousands of miles.
Symmetrix VMAX, the company's flagship enterprise storage platform, also got a cloud boost, including: native support for emerging cloud networking protocol Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE); expanded EMC PowerPath and third-party support for Federated Live Migration; and RSA external key manager for DARE (data-at-rest encryption). VNX, which is replacing the midrange Clariion storage area network (SAN) and Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) systems, can now connect to the cloud with the Cloud Tiering Appliance, enabling the unified storage solution to automatically tier "cold" or inactive files to the cloud to maximize efficiency, optimize performance and lower costs. Also announced was a connector for the Google Search Appliance (GSA) that improves time-to-information with on-the-fly indexing for content stored on VNX systems.
For content management and collaborative applications, the company announced EMC Captiva, EMC Document Sciences, CenterStage and Documentum OnDemand. The OnDemand offerings will be available in the second half of 2011. EMC also promises "cloud-to-ground" root-cause analysis for data centers with the latest release (version 3.0) of Ionix Server Manager, as well as new releases of Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) software, unique purpose-built management software for VCE Vblock Platforms.
